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Spring conference season this year is a bit more interesting than usual. It's mostly thanks to a couple of new conferences on the circuit that I think will further important industry conversations. A few weeks ago, the inaugural "Forum," Hosted by Funnel Leasing, established a new place to discuss the increasingly popular topic of centralization. Last week saw the inaugural REBA Insights conference in Vail, CO. There were parallels between the two events that I will discuss in this post. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the experience of participating in a Colorado state congressional hearing on a proposed law to outlaw revenue management. One of several points in that article was about the potential gap in our industry's advocacy that appears when state legislatures create national problems. 

It's that time of year again when NMHC publishes its lists of the top 50 owners, operators, and various other categories of multifamily companies. It's invaluable information: multifamily companies are notoriously difficult to track, so we should all appreciate the fine work the NMHC research team does to compile and publish the lists each year. 

The inaugural Forum—the User Conference of Funnel Leasing—is in the books. I was privileged to take part in a hugely successful event that boasted an impressive attendee list last week at the stunningly beautiful Terranea Resort near Los Angeles. 

2024 seems likely to be a year of rapid acceleration in the adoption of AI in multifamily. The question is how rapid and what kinds of tasks will it be doing for us? During this year's 20for20 interviews, the 20 leaders were asked to speculate a little on the direction AI is likely to take. What the conversations revealed is that most leaders view AI as something you buy from third-party vendors specializing in this area. 

What is a trend? A couple of months into 2024, there's been a lot of talk about the prevailing trends for the year ahead, as there always is. Our brains are hardwired to look for patterns in everything that we see. As a species, we like to read the tea leaves.

Last week, a couple of important events unfolded in the ongoing story of multifamily revenue management (RM). On Tuesday, a US Senate bill was introduced, mostly restating the illegality of price-fixing. Although this bill has received considerable attention, it goes nowhere near as far as a Colorado state bill that was presented to a committee hearing at the Colorado Capitol one day later. 

There's been a lot of talk of multifamily pricing over the last year or so, with a slew of high-profile lawsuits alleging that software is forcing prices upwards across the USA. In a December 2023 newsletter,  NMHC did a thorough job of showing how record supply is placing downward pressure on rents. 

NMHC's extensive analysis makes it clear that it is supply and demand, not software, that drives pricing across multifamily markets. But that is not the subject of this article

It's a brand new year, and with it comes an opportunity for a fresh take on a familiar theme. Readers of this blog will be familiar with the view that multifamily technology vendors often approach their products incorrectly. Specifically, in their eagerness to identify the key selling points for their technology, they often overlook the main reasons why companies buy their products. 

It's December, which is the time of the year when I have the absolute pleasure of sitting down for 20 in-depth conversations with multifamily executives. For those unfamiliar with 20for20, it's an annual survey where 20 leaders (ten heads of operations and ten heads of technology) from leading multifamily companies share their thoughts on the year that is ending and the year to come.